There are many human situations and roles in which conferencing and collaboration takes place. For example, medical researchers use such a conference to jointly discuss ongoing work. Lawyers negotiating and/or discussing the progress of a case also use such technology. Conferences can be supplied by providers of social media services, on the web and elsewhere, to participants in ad hoc and other types of groups. As will be shown, any grouping of humans, ad hoc or otherwise who wish to communicate in a multi-modal manner can be served by the collaboration systems of this disclosure and it is not limited to any specific class or classes of users. The disclosure will be described below in terms of its use by managers and others in the environment. This is used as a non-limiting example and is not intended to limit the applicability of the technology to that class of participant.
It is well known that managers and other workers in an organization must attend to multiple priorities contemporaneously. They have many responsibilities that, of necessity, compete for their attention. It is one of the primary tasks of managers to partition and fairly share their attention across these conflicting responsibilities. As a result of this, it is common for managers to multi-task. A common example of this is a case in which a manager is participating in a conference call and at the same time reading emails and quickly dealing with people who enter their office. Managers must quickly shift their attention back and forth while at the same time maintaining their knowledge of the state of each of their individual tasks.
Various modalities of collaboration lend themselves to differing requirements for the degree of attention. Applications with a modality for interactions mediated, for example by text, lend itself to an intermittent and more limited degree of attention. A manager gives most of their attention to an audio conference while still being able to quickly and briefly attend to email text messages during lulls in the audio conference. However to deal with a face-to-face interaction with a quick visitor to their office will require the manager's full attention. Their current awareness to the conference call can be lost and, as a result, the manager can lose their place in it. This can be disruptive to the conference as the manager attempts to restore their knowledge of the current state of the conference and can lead to inefficiency.
A solution that will allow the manager to adjust the level of attention that they can place in a conference call while still retaining a connection to it would be useful, and is the context of the present disclosure. That is, it will be useful to provide the manager with the ability to be involved in conferences with a modality greater than they can provide at a specific time. This can arise, as described above, by the manager balancing multiple priorities at the same time and so multitasking between multiple conferences. As well, it can arise because the manager at any specific time can be able to connect to a conference through a device which has the capability of supporting a lower degree of interaction that required by the modality of the conference in which they wish to participate. So, for example, a manager can wish to connect to an audio conference through a device that is capable only of a text modality such as, for example, through an IM interface.
It should be pointed out that to produce a useful multi-modal conference system goes beyond the well-known concept of media transcoding. It is not sufficient to convert from one media to another. Thus, for example, the use of a text-to-speech (TTS) converter to transcode between text and voice is not sufficient in moving between a semi-synchronous and a synchronous conference. Useful interactions within a conference are enabled by expectations that participants will conform to certain practices or behaviors that work together to allow a coherent and focused discussion or conversation. Media transcoding without taking into account such expectations as, for example, turn taking, floor domination and other required expectations (described in detail below) will inhibit and possibly make the synchronous discussion impossible. If an incoming IM is converted to voice and then placed into the voice medium of a synchronous conference without consideration for the current speaker then discussion will become very difficult. A practical multi-modal conferencing system must provide mechanisms that will enable the various expectations of the conferences of differing modalities that are being merged.
Managers or other classes of human participants can effectively utilize the system that will allow the effective interaction in conferences through devices of different types of modality. This can be due to the degree of attention that the manager or other type of human participant can provide or due to limitations of the device that the manager is using. The system provided must allow for effective interactions within a conference and at the same time allow participants to interact in conferences with devices of various modalities. Participants can select the modality that best suits their current circumstance but still have the capability of effective interaction in a conference.
The objectives of this disclosure are to allow the linking of devices of multiple modalities in the service of a conference. That is, the disclosure will describe how the mechanisms required produce a useful conference or collaboration and how they can be linked across representations of the conference in two or more modalities. This will have two potential benefits. Firstly, it allows managers or other classes of human participant to attend to a conference in a modality that is suited to the level of attention that they can provide and to the limitations of the device which they are using. Secondly, it allows a manager or other type of human participant to participate in and/or review a conference in multiple modalities. Each modality has strengths and weakness in promoting useful interactions, understanding etc. Having representations of a single conference in two or more modalities allows managers to chose momentarily the modality which is best suited to their particular needs at any one time. Additional features will become apparent from the description provided below.